By Peter Metzinger, Co-Managing Director of SPIN – Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network
On Thursday, 20 August 2026, I sat in the auditorium at PSI West in Villigen and watched something I have been waiting for since SPIN was founded: the official opening of a plant that turns renewable methanol into certified jet fuel – not in a flask, not in a pilot loop, but as one continuous, integrated process from the methanol tank to the jet fuel tank. The plant is called aerobrew. It was built by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, a SPIN member) together with the Zurich-based start-up Metafuels. And it is, as far as anyone in the room could tell, the first of its kind in the world.
What was actually opened
The numbers are modest by industrial standards and that is exactly the point. The plant produces around 50 litres of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) per day, contains more than 30 tonnes of steel and over a kilometre of piping, and is the first facility worldwide to combine all production steps of the methanol-to-jet route under one roof. Metafuels’ Matthias Schnellmann was refreshingly clear on stage: 50 litres a day was never meant to fuel an airline. It is the smallest scale at which the whole chain can be tested together – chemistry, catalysts, process integration and day-to-day operation – in a configuration that maps directly onto a commercial plant design.
The chain itself is straightforward to describe and hard to do. Renewable electricity and water give green hydrogen (H₂); combined with recycled CO₂, this becomes renewable methanol. aerobrew then dehydrates the methanol into short C2–C3 hydrocarbons, grows those chains to kerosene length (C9–C16) in what PSI’s Marco Ranocchiari called the major technological innovation of the process, hydrogenates them and fractionates the result into drop-in jet fuel. The output is fully compatible with existing aircraft, engines and airport infrastructure, and the developers put the lifecycle emission reduction at up to 90 per cent compared with fossil kerosene. In the current configuration the fuel can be blended with conventional kerosene at up to 50 per cent – the ceiling set by today’s standards, not by the chemistry.
Why I call it a milestone
Three things impressed me, and none of them is the building.
Speed. Metafuels closed its seed round about three and a half years ago with a concept proven at laboratory scale. The project with PSI started in 2024. The plant was built and installed on the PSI campus in 2025. In mid-2026 the ASTM accreditation of the methanol-to-jet pathway was completed – the certification that allows fuel made this way to fly at all. From concept to operational deployment in under four years is not normal in this industry, and several speakers said so openly.
Integration. Everyone in Power-to-X knows individual process steps that work beautifully on their own. What separates a promising process from an industrial technology is getting every stage to run together, continuously, in one plant. That is the real achievement here, and it is why the plant will spend the coming months running multiple campaigns to generate the operating data, design basis and trained operators that lenders, insurers and regulators will demand before they commit to anything bigger. Every risk retired in Villigen is a risk that is not carried into projects worth hundreds of millions.
The Swiss recipe. Marco Ranocchiari described three ingredients that very few places in the world combine on a single campus: fundamental catalysis science, large-scale facilities such as the Swiss Light Source – where the optimal atomic arrangement of the catalyst was identified at the Debye beamline – and the ESI platform for scale-up. Add an entrepreneurial partner with a small, experienced team, and a supportive Federal Office of Energy, and you get a plant in four years. This is exactly the kind of research-to-industry collaboration SPIN exists to promote.
From Villigen to Rotterdam
The demonstration plant is a foundation, not a destination. Metafuels’ first commercial facility, Turbe, is planned at the Evos terminal in the Port of Rotterdam. Front-end engineering and design is under way with McDermott, and production is targeted from 2030 – in step with the e-SAF sub-mandates of ReFuelEU Aviation. Turbe will produce tonnes of kerosene per day, the scale at which fuel is actually sold, and the data from Villigen feed straight into its design. We reported earlier this year on the Dutch government funding Metafuels secured for this project.
Note what is missing from that sentence: Switzerland. The science is Swiss, the company is Swiss, the demonstration plant is Swiss – and the first commercial plant will be Dutch. That is not a criticism of Metafuels; Rotterdam has the port, the offtake and, above all, a regulatory framework with binding e-SAF quotas. It is a criticism of us.
Now politics and administration must clear the runway
Aviation will not be electrified across continents; the batteries are simply too heavy. Our position at SPIN has always been: maybe a little less flying – but definitely fossil-free flying. aerobrew shows the technology for fossil-free flying exists and works as an integrated system. Whether fossil emissions from flying actually drop towards zero is now less a question of chemistry than of framework conditions.
So my message to Bern, to the cantons and to the federal administration is simple: remove the unnecessary hurdles. That means a clear, stable recognition of e-SAF in Swiss law that matches what ReFuelEU offers across the border; permitting procedures for Power-to-X plants that are measured in months, not years; electricity market rules and grid fees that do not punish flexible electrolysis; and a CO₂ accounting framework in which recycled CO₂ counts as what it is – a feedstock for defossilisation, not a liability. None of this requires new subsidies. It requires that the state stops standing in the way of an industry it has just helped to create.
Not enough renewable methanol is produced yet for SAF to scale; that is true, and it is the next bottleneck. But methanol has a global market, existing logistics and a growing Power-to-X supply chain – several SPIN members are part of it. The Swiss demonstration plant shows the end of the chain works. It is now up to policy to make sure the chain is allowed to grow here, and not only elsewhere.
Congratulations to the teams at PSI and Metafuels. You have built the runway. Let us make sure the aircraft is cleared for take-off.
Sources: Opening event of the aerobrew demonstration plant, PSI Villigen, 20 August 2026 (presentations by Saurabh Kapoor, Matthias Schnellmann and Marco Ranocchiari); press report by Bruno Knellwolf, 21 August 2026. All statements by speakers are paraphrased from the event.
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 – «Reality Check with Net Zero»
22 September 2026, 10–18h, Kursaal Bern. Co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and SPIN, with partner Réseau H2 Suisse Romande. Programme and registration